Blogs & articles

The Big Idea: Tog Studio - Empowering people through design and collaboration

Blog

03 May 2013

Jamie Cooke

Tog Studio host ‘live-build’ events. This means that people who are usually excluded from the construction process take an active role in building their own project. In doing so participants are empowered to learn practical skills and teamwork to deliver a valuable community asset.

The art of sharing ideas, or, how I learned to stop worrying and love crowdsourcing

Blog

25 Apr 2013

Joanna Massie

I've recently been playing a lot of The Great Brain Experiment: an app created by UCL and the Wellcome Trust. It's a crowdsourcing game in which users (or players, or participants, or bored commuters - take your pick) do a series of brain games, which then get fed back into a research project. It’s a great game - it justifies my timewasting by feeding into research and allows me to develop my response and memory skills (by which I mean feeds into my competitive side by seeing how I do versus the average user). [pullquote]Whereas previously you’d identify an issue, try to solve it in the lab or officespace with people who also work in the same building, now you can use the power of the internet, for information, communication and interaction.[/pullquote]

Whole Person Recovery - One Year On

Blog

24 Apr 2013

The RSA’s Whole Person Recovery project’s first anniversary is this spring.  You may have been following our progress in West Kent through the fellowship newsletter, the Whole Person Recovery Newsletter or the Recovery Blog.  Maybe you’ve attended a Public Event Programme lecture or a Recovery Alliance Meeting.  If this is the first you’re hearing of the programme it’s a perfect opportunity to get involved.  You don’t need to have personal experience of addiction or recovery to contribute to the programme. Recovery is a complex and individual journey with which we can all relate to in respect of its organic or non-linear nature.

The spirit of volunteerism is alive and well… It just needs recognising

Blog

23 Apr 2013

Mark Hall

During the 2012 London Olympics around 70,000 Games Makers volunteered to help to make the 2012 Games a huge success. Their purple and red shirts seemed to be everywhere, and they were heaped with praise as the games came to a close. And rightly so! To put together a sporting event on the scale of the London Olympics to such a high standard would have been impossible without the thousands of budding volunteers. This spirit of volunteerism didn't just appear overnight. Over 250,000 people applied, nearly half of whom had never volunteered before. Committed volunteers are out there, but often they are not given the recognition or publicity that their commitment deserves.

Creating jobs for amazing women: Ideas and inspiration from the Social Entrepreneurs Network

Blog

22 Apr 2013

A couple of weeks ago we were lucky enough to hold an event at OxfordJam.  A three day fringe festival, Oxford Jam runs parallel to the Skoll World Forum, ensuring that all the great and the good in the social enterprise sector descend into Oxford for three days of inspiration, making connections, and learning from all the varied work going on. We held one of our quarterly Social Enterprise Spotlight events there; find out more online about Social Enterprise Spotlight, our case-study of nine social entrepreneurs.  Employing the skills and expertise of two brilliant RSA Fellows, the event titled Who do you help and how do you know? set out to look at impact measurement from a more human point of view. [pullquote]It is important to stop and take a moment to remember why we do what we do.[/pullquote]

Prisoners in work: a broadcast to the nation

Blog

18 Apr 2013

Sunday’s episode of Channel 4’s Secret Millions series focused on a venture supported by RSA Catalyst. Led by Fellows, it aims to reduce reoffending by making offenders more employable: manufacturing and assembling quality furniture during the time that is often spent sitting in cells and being unemployed on release. The venture was selected by the RSA’s Social Entrepreneurs Network to be part of their Spotlight initiative and it also made perfect sense to me that this was the first Catalyst-funded idea to make it onto primetime television:

The fortnight in Fellowship: in twelve tweets

Blog

17 Apr 2013

Here at the RSA and across the 101 countries where we have Fellows there is always something interesting going on…

Social change through Fellowship: Four ways to engage

Blog

08 Apr 2013

Most of the RSA’s work can be traced back one basic thought: that the best way to change society for the better is to help people change it for themselves. That’s why so much of our work is about how people can understand their own behaviour, see how they relate to others, and develop the skills and capabilities they need to make the best use of that knowledge.

The fortnight in Fellowship: Raspberry Pi; Whitley Arts; Stephen Fry; Good People...

Blog

03 Apr 2013

Here at the RSA and across the 101 countries where we have Fellows there is always something interesting going on…